I just purchased a AMD64 system with a Radeon 9800XT. But when I checked at ATI's website, there is no Radeon drivers for 64bit Linux so what should I do? Anyone here got their Radeons to work with Gentoo in 64bit mode?

You can use VESA with XFree 4.3.0...which works...but the 60Hz refresh rates give me headaches so I went ahead and built 4.3.99 (4.4 RC2) last night and the radeon drivers seem to work great. Don't try radeon drivers on 4.3.0...you will get hard locks. I found that out the hard way. I read that some apps don't compile against X4.4...but I've not had problems yet....built k3b just a minute ago and it works find. I'm building mozilla as we speak. Give it a shot if you can't deal with low refresh rates, otherwise VESA works fine.

Can we get some steps to get either VESA working or the Radeon drivers working? I just built my A64 box with the latest LiveCD and cannot get xfree-drm to compile (numerous errors posted already in the Gentoo forums) and would like some form of X.

Just use DRM from the kernel and it should work fine. VESA is too slow for me. The redrawing is too slow. I get 1300fps on my radeon 9200 in glxgears. (2.6 kernel and 64 bit native)

Care to post your XF86Config file?

I'd like to compare, I'm using a Radeon 9600 Pro and it refuses to enable DRM, and this:
452 frames in 5.0 seconds = 90.400 FPS

Really bites...

George

Yeah I was getting 19fps sometimes until I got this running. Just make sure you have DRM enabled in the kernel for the radeon. (I used static not a module) Also I did not use the radeon fb. I used the vesa fb. You probably have to change your PCI bus id. My mouse wheel doesnt work for some reason though (Unrelated)...

"You can use VESA with XFree 4.3.0...which works...but the 60Hz refresh rates give me headaches so I went ahead and built 4.3.99 (4.4 RC2) last night and the radeon drivers seem to work great. Don't try radeon drivers on 4.3.0...you will get hard locks."

I'm new to Linux so I don't really understand what you mean by "built 4.3.99(4.4 RC2) and the radeon drivers seem to work great". What is 4.3.99(4.4RC2)? Is that a version of XFree or are you talking about Radeon drivers? Also, where did you get the Radeon drivers? You using the 32bit ones or did you make yourself a 64bit version?

"You can use VESA with XFree 4.3.0...which works...but the 60Hz refresh rates give me headaches so I went ahead and built 4.3.99 (4.4 RC2) last night and the radeon drivers seem to work great. Don't try radeon drivers on 4.3.0...you will get hard locks."

I'm new to Linux so I don't really understand what you mean by "built 4.3.99(4.4 RC2) and the radeon drivers seem to work great". What is 4.3.99(4.4RC2)? Is that a version of XFree or are you talking about Radeon drivers? Also, where did you get the Radeon drivers? You using the 32bit ones or did you make yourself a 64bit version?

Yeah don't use vesa(very very slow) or xfree 4.4(alpha quality). I would stay away from 4.4 for the time being. If you get hardlocks recompile xfree without aggressive cflags (the ebuild removes some anyway). The "stable" xfree radeon driver works just fine with kernel DRM. At least it has for the last week for me with no crashes. I would stay away from xfree 4.4 for now. You are probably just asking for more problems than its worth.

There really arent any tricks to get this card to work with the kernel drm and xfree radeon driver. If you are having a problem post your abbreviated config file.

well...I wouldn't consider my CFlags to be too agressive to begin with

CFLAGS="-O3 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"

The athlon64 technotes specifically mention that you will have lockups while using the xfree 4.3 radeon drivers so if you don't get them then consider yourself lucky. 4.3.99 seems quite stable in my opinion. I had it running for 4 hours earlier...no problems at all.

there's no reason to set aggressive CFLAGS on the x86_64 gcc backend. I would bet anyone a box of donuts there is no difference in performance between -O2 and -O3 right now.

<rant>

This will change when Intel releases their "x86-64" compatible chip" and complicates the gcc backend by making it all CFLAGS-stupid like the i686 stuff is... by adding SSE3... and who knows what else. Buncha embrace & extend weenies.

"x86-64 is cool, but we don't have anything that competes with it in active production yet. Oops. So we're going to attempt to derail AMD's success with soundbites in the news media downplaying the significance of 64-bit desktops. We plan on producing a copy of AMD's idea soon. Once we make the chip, only then will 64-bit desktops be worthwhile."

"Oh, and IA-64 is on its way to becoming one of the world's colossal R&D failures. Oops. But we'll ride this slow-moving trainwreck right through anybody who's brave enough to buy into it."

As long as there's enough detail where I can reproduce it here myself. And you know, the difference in performance should be relatively significant. For example, a 1-second difference on an operation that takes both binaries ~10 minutes to complete is not worthwhile.

I'd love to be proven wrong -- and if I am, I'll happily kick down some donuts.

Just use DRM from the kernel and it should work fine. VESA is too slow for me. The redrawing is too slow. I get 1300fps on my radeon 9200 in glxgears. (2.6 kernel and 64 bit native)

Care to post your XF86Config file?

I'd like to compare, I'm using a Radeon 9600 Pro and it refuses to enable DRM, and this:
452 frames in 5.0 seconds = 90.400 FPS

Really bites...

George

Yeah I was getting 19fps sometimes until I got this running. Just make sure you have DRM enabled in the kernel for the radeon. (I used static not a module) Also I did not use the radeon fb. I used the vesa fb. You probably have to change your PCI bus id. My mouse wheel doesnt work for some reason though (Unrelated)...